FLORENCE, ITALY 2000

location: Firenze
client: Azienda USL 10 di Firenze

The embrassement to build on the slopes of Piazzale Michelangelo pushes the search to leave the history of major architecture: any articulated volume, any languages appear suitable. Today our sensibility neeeds different expressions even more in a garden of humanity, like the hills around Florence. Instead of narratives, I preferred to refer to the facts of everyday life, trying to make them at least courteous, perhaps elegant, and I researched the elements of necessity: the excavation, construction, accommodation landscape. So not the villa, but the limonaia; not the building, but the substructure; not erect, but dig; not the order of the composition, but the tectonic; not decorate, but to build. Typically a project begins from the story of their settlement issue, but here perhaps we need to start by reading the landscape: the ridge, the line of the hills, the pergolas, the copper on the vines, the land tilled, repeated order cropland on the walls in a straight, perhaps the material solidity captured by Fattori and Rosai, by Michelucci and Ricci, when the wall prevails on the party. In this area there was also an industrial construction stopped, which entered the project as an idea of ​​a place of work, of an abandoned factory, then inhabited again - partly by vegetation - with towering walls, roofs and floors collapsed and then rebuilt. So I imagined a pergola / factory above a tectonic volume in the countryside, I decomposed bodies and retaining walls, as a commentary on the terraces and cultivated slopes, I imagined a horizontal fracture between rustic and polished, between the embankment and superstructure.